OpenOffice.org 3.1: Better Performance

Graphics Goods

Another notable enhancement in OpenOffice.org 3.1 is the suite’s improved rendering of on-screen graphics through anti-aliasing, an advance that applies to the entire suite but that should prove particularly pleasing to users of the product’s presentation component, Impress. In previous versions of OpenOffice.org, graphics such as circles and other basic shapes tended to render with somewhat jagged borders, which could give documents an unfinished look.

I opened a sample PowerPoint presentation within Impress 3.0. While Impress did a good job with the document’s formatting, the shapes within the presentation looked noticeably rougher than in PowerPoint — effectively snatching defeat from the jaws of format fidelity victory. I opened the same document using Impress 3.1 and found that the edges of the shapes within rendered just as smoothly as in Microsoft PowerPoint.

While working with the same presentation, I dragged one of my shapes around on the document and watched as Impress 3.1 displayed a translucent, “shadow” version of the object, complete with the text that the shape contained. In contrast, Impress 3.0 displayed an empty frame during dragging operations, and PowerPoint 2007 displayed a shadow image of the shape but one that lacked the attached text.

The Write Stuff

Version 3.0 of OpenOffice.org’s word processor, Writer, introduced Microsoft Office-style comments in the margins of a document (Previous versions of OpenOffice.org socked comments away behind small yellow marker images that I always found too troublesome to use).

With Version 3.1, Writer’s comments feature now supports conversations among document editors.

I opened a document in Word 2007, inserted a comment, saved the document and opened it in Writer 3.1. My comment appeared in the document’s margin, and I was able to right-click it and choose “reply” from a short menu. Writer created a new comment below the original comment, which included the date and time of the original comment along with my Word 2007 user name. I could continue the conversation from Word by adding new comments, but Word lacks the “reply” shortcut.

Users of OpenOffice.org 3.1 in networked office environments will benefit from the suite’s bolstered file locking, which now does a better job preventing overwriting of documents stored on networked shares and accessed by users running different operating systems and applications.

I found that separate Windows XP instances running OpenOffice.org 3.0 seemed to handle file locking well enough, giving me the option to open a read-only version of the file or to make a copy. But OpenOffice.org 3.0 would happily open a document that was already open in Office 2007. With Version 3.1, file locking worked properly for me between OpenOffice.org and Office 2007, whether both applications ran atop Windows XP or OpenOffice.org ran from a Linux machine.

Conclusion

Version 3.1 of the open-source OpenOffice.org productivity suite provides plenty of feature and performance enhancements. The performance of the Calc spreadsheet program has been notably improved, as has rendering of on-screen objects in the Impress presentation app. The Write word processor offers new collaboration functionality.